Goldilocks (13 page)

“From the neck up I’m perfect,” Cole said, “every thought pure.”

The doctor laughed. He was still in his scrubs and had blood on his knee. “I’ve never had you under my knife, have I? Lucky you.”

Each stepped aside as an attendant pushed by with a steam trolley of food. Cole said, “Maybe not me, but you had my uncle.”

“God, yes, I did a gastrectomy on him. Years ago, but I remember it well. I thought his intestines were going to spring out at me. That happened just as the head scrub nurse sliced herself on a scalpel. And I had a miserable headache all through it. How’s he doing?”

“He’s fine. Living in Florida.”

“Glad to hear some of my patients survive.”

A nurse came out of Louise Baker’s room and said to Cole, “You may go in now.”

“You going in too, Doctor?”

“I’ve seen her. She’s doing OK. Lucky for her the weapon was small-caliber, otherwise the nerve damage would’ve been greater.”

“There were two shots,” Cole said.

The doctor held up a single finger. “That’s all she took.”

There were no flowers in the room. Cole had expected to see many, but she had allowed none. He had expected to find her flat on her back, but she was sitting erect in the high cranked-up bed. Her black hair was swept back, giving her pallid face a stark emphasis. Cole’s eyes traveled curiously over her.

“This what you’re looking for?” she said, and widened the top of her johnny. The bandage embraced her left shoulder and ran tightly taped down to the rise of her breast, which was black and blue. Awkwardly she tipped her face, and Cole kissed her dry cheek.

“You look uncomfortable,” he said.

“I’m in pain, but they give me stuff. The worst of it was I lost blood and got transfused. That scares the hell out of me.”

“The blood was mine.”

“Good. I didn’t know that. You’re in my veins, Barney.” She patted the bed. “Sit here. Just don’t do it hard.”

He sat gently on the edge. “I called your housekeeper. She made the decision not to tell your husband just yet.”

“That was wise. I’ll call him later.” She shifted slightly against the raised pillow and winced. Her voice went flat. “You know what it was, don’t you, Barney? It was a hit.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t know that.”

“You know I’m connected.”

“I prefer not to know. None of my business.”

“You knew Scampy was.”

“That was the suspicion.”

She tugged at the covers with a hand bleached of its color. Her face was gloomy. “Am I in all the papers?”

“The
Eagle-Tribune
ran an inside story, no picture. I doubt any other papers picked it up.”

Her eyes flashed at him. “I don’t get it.”

“The police are treating it as a shooting during an attempted mugging. I told them a man tried to snatch your jewelry, you resisted.”

Her eyes filled. “I thought everything I worked for in Mallard Junction would be gone. I’d be too notorious. Thank you, Barney.”

“Thank Chick Ryan. He went along with it.”

Her eyes fluttered shut and reopened grudgingly, as if whatever sensations were running through her were unpleasant. “I saw his face, Barney. No one I know.”

“Can you describe him?”

She shook her head. “That close, he should’ve got me. I lucked out, didn’t I?” Her mouth parted in a slow unnatural smile. “You didn’t set me up, did you Barney?”

Cole did not bother to answer. There was a picture on the wall, a pastoral scene in watercolor. He stared at it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But it’s a funny feeling to come that close. You’re not the same after.” She picked up a water glass and drank from it, her long throat pulsing as the water went down. Then she clenched the glass and said, “I need your help.”

“I’m not a bodyguard.”

“I need answers, Barney. For my own safety I need them fast.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“No,” she said, “but Chick would. Scampy died leaving a lot of money on the street. Me in charge, people thought it was uncollectable until I used muscle. That made me enemies. Tell Chick to start there. I’ve got to know if this thing was local.”

For several seconds Cole was silent, his gaze back on the watercolor, the name of the artist etched childishly in a corner. “Chick was your muscle, wasn’t he?”

She turned her head slightly as if the lighting were defining her face more than she wanted it to. Her jaw was set.

Cole said, “Why don’t you deal with him directly?”

“I want to do it through you. You’re the one I trust.”

“Few moments ago you didn’t.”

Her eyes were half closed. “Remember when we were kids, Barney? I mean, little kids. We played cops and robbers, and Chick was always the cop. He pat-searched me.”

“Till you got wise.”

“You put me wise. Do this for me, Barney.”

Cole stood up. He pried the empty glass from her hand and placed it on the bedside cabinet. “What makes you think I will?”

“Because I’m scared, and you know it.”

• • •

The hour was late. Cole, awake, lay with his head high in the propped pillow. A nightlamp burned vaguely from the top of the dresser, for Kit Fletcher did not like sleeping in the dark. Her silken underthings had been left errantly about, tossed here and there in languid abandon. She lay sprawled beside him on her stomach, a large exemplary leg thrown clear of the covers. He thought her sound asleep, but her voice curved up at him. “Are you thinking about her?”

“I’m not thinking of anything,” he said.

“That’s humanly impossible.” She turned over on her back, much more of her coming out of the covers, and lay pink and vivid, her contours unsparingly feminine and heroically proportioned. She made a dish of her belly. “I want to know more about her.”

There was nothing he wanted to add to the little he had already told her, and he bided his time by staying quiet. She shifted closer, her body blissfully cool and clean against him.

“So far she sounds fascinating.”

“She’s dangerous,” he said, “if that’s what you mean.”

“In her business she has to be.”

“I didn’t say what kind of business she’s in.”

“You didn’t have to.” She pushed the covers from him and passed a hand over his chest. “You love me, Barney?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“More than her?”

He raised his head higher. In the half-light the mirror over the dresser looked like water on the wall. “I can’t believe you’re jealous.”

“I can’t either, but I am.” Her smile was frugal. “A side of me you haven’t seen before. Drink it in, Barney, I don’t show it often.”

He felt the faint chill in her voice and the cool give of her leg against him, as if the jealousy were some ill-begotten child coming to rest between them. She drew her knees up.

“When is she getting out of the hospital?”

“Tomorrow,” he said, conscious of a drumroll. He was not sure whether it came from his stomach or hers.

“What kind of help does she want from you? Legal?”

“Personal.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You’re making too much of it.”

“I was an only child, Barney. I’m not used to sharing.”

Her raised knees were gleaming and taut. The heel of her left foot bore the ghost of a blister, from which he drew an image of her forging through Boston crowds with a high sense of purpose. She said, “If you had to choose between her and me, I wouldn’t be automatic.”

“How do you know that?”

“The way you talk about her. She has deep roots in you, mine are shallow.” She lifted her face, one cheek carrying the phantom pattern of the pillow. “You probably think I take you for granted, but I don’t. Never have. Everything’s an act, Barney, just like in the courtroom. The best of us lawyers deserve Oscars.”

He touched her. “What are you afraid of?”

“You.”

“That’s silly.”

“Then of the future.”

“Why should you be afraid of the future?”

“Half of life is sadness. The second half.”

He spoke slowly. “Then maybe you should marry me.”

“I’ve had enough of marriage.”

He stared, his eyes alive to the unswerving beauty of her face. “Then I don’t know what to say.”

“Sometimes nothing is best.”

She rose from the bed, and as always he was taken with the sight of her calm wholesome shape. After she vanished into the little bathroom, he lay listening to the rush of tap water and the flush of the john. He heard her blow her nose. When she reappeared he was moved by the ever-newness of her, the soap-and-water freshness that made her bright and immediate.

“Barney.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to be asleep.”

“I’m not. Can’t you tell?”

A knee pressed down beside him, and the other one swung over him. She sat astride him, a warm and wide weight below his chest. “Barney.”

He gazed straight up. “What?”

“I’d never hurt you. Don’t ever hurt me.”

• • •

“We’re running out of everything,” Henry Witlo muttered as he rummaged through the refrigerator, clinking bottles and bowls. Finally he said, “We’ll have pancakes, that OK with you?” Emma Goss said nothing, and he forced her to set the table while he broke eggs and made the batter. Dishes rattled. “Will you calm down, for God’s sake? Will you do that much for me?”

She was shivering and shaking, and her wrists still ached from where he had fended her off, gripped her hard, and brought her to her knees. Her breathing was labored. She poured maple syrup into a small pitcher, spilling some.

“What’s the matter with your hand?” he asked.

Her thumb hurt. For the first time she noticed it was hot and swollen.

“You did that to yourself,” he said. “Not my fault.”

She transferred flatware to the table, dropping a spoon.

Seconds later she found herself with a knife in her hand, the sharpest in the house, and she stared at the blade.

He had eyes in the back of his head. “What are you going to do, stick me with it?”

He made a heap of pancakes, placing some in the oven to keep them hot. The rest he forked onto their plates and drenched them with syrup, emptying the pitcher, though she protested with her eyes. She sat with her chair not fully drawn in, as if at any moment she might leap out of it. She took little bites until hunger urged her on to greater ones, and she began swallowing almost without chewing. Henry, jaws stuffed, grinned from across the table.

“Guess I’m not such a bad cook.”

She rendered the smallest kind of answer with her eyes, distrusting what was going on behind his.

“Use your napkin, Mrs. Goss.” He touched a corner of his mouth with his little finger. “You’ve got something here.”

Her face changed color. A part of it puckered.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

Later he left her alone to clean up, and she was glad to busy herself, to be away from his face, the grip of his eyes. Her stomach heaved from what she had eaten, but she ignored it, along with the throb of her thumb. Then too soon she heard his heavy tread. He reappeared with eyelashes wet and yellow hair slicked back at the sides. He had on one of her husband’s white dress shirts tucked tightly into his jeans, the collar open, the cuffs turned back at the wrists. Something was in his grasp. Sharply she turned away.

“Don’t be afraid.”

She stook like a child while he brushed her hair and yanked the back of her dress to straighten the seam. Then he jingled something in his free hand. A pouch with two keys falling loose. She stared at them. They were to Harold’s Plymouth.

“Guess what,” he said. “I’m going to take you for ice cream.”

She tried to lock her feet to the floor, to hook her hand under the table, but his strength would allow none of it. The white of her husband’s shirt blinded her. Her feet slid forward when he pushed open the side door. She was about to say, “Leave the light on,” but it no longer mattered as she pictured her death in dark woods or behind a derelict building, with a policeman beaming a light over her body. She floated out onto the breezeway, where the evening air gushed hot from the street against her face.

“You don’t even need a sweater,” he said cheerfully.

Inside the garage the darkness swelled around her, and she thought she heard voices: her parents calling to her, her teacher correcting her, her husband scolding her. The garage door rose with a clatter, and streetlight plunged in on her. Henry nudged her into the car and within seconds was sitting beside her. As soon as he turned the key the radio came on with the cracked voice of the aged Sinatra, Harold’s station, the only one he had tuned in on the push buttons. She shuddered. The motor purred as if brand-new.

“I’ve checked everything, Mrs. Goss. All it needs is a little air in the tires.”

He backed swiftly out of the garage, past his Dodge Charger, which was crushing the lawn, and swung smoothly onto the street. Her heart leaped when the headlights picked up Mrs. Whipple talking to a neighbor, and her face flamed when Henry tooted and waved. Farther down the street, he switched from Sinatra to rock.

“Please,” she said, pressing an ear.

He turned it off and stuck an elbow out the window. “Where’s the best place for ice cream, Mrs. Goss?”

She could have mentioned Sid White’s in Andover or Benson’s in Boxford, places Harold had liked, but she said nothing. He drove into the thick of Lawrence, the traffic fretful and full of fumes. When he stopped at a signal, she stared at the glow of brake lights on the car ahead of them. When he sped over the bridge to the north side of the city, she prayed for a collision, a stupendous crash with a rain of glass and metal, in which he would die and she would rise up to walk away whole.

“I’m not sure where I’m going,” he said. “You want to help, I’ll listen.”

“I don’t want an ice cream,” she said.

“We get there, you’ll change your mind.” He smiled over at her. “You wait, you’ll see.”

On Broadway, where the traffic was sluggish, forbidding steel shutters locked in stores for the night. Companionless men hung around outside the Wonder Bar. She felt conspicuous, certain that their reaching eyes would hit upon her. In front of a novelty shop a whiskered scavenger, whose chesty cough she could hear, was dismantling a pyramid of empty crates. Hispanic youths moved as if to a rhumba beat against the savage glare of a sub shop. At any moment she expected them to launch an assault.